I’ve been talking to Jay Holben, the director who’s doing the documentary, Camgirls, and a person I consider a pretty decent, creative, guy and thinking about where the cam world is going. I’ve been more watching and reading than performing in recent years, but I’m still a part of the community and while no one’s asked me about “the book” recently - except Jay Holben - who wasn’t being a douche about it.

The book I’m talking about is Digital Burlesque: When the Girl Next Door Goes Global, which is/was the working title for the book I am/was/will always be sort of working on, I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet. Basically all I do is cram myself with tidbits of info and hope like hell one day it’ll all come into place, if only as a memoir when I’m 80.

But lately I’ve been thinking sooner than that, but no time soon. The documentary sounds interesting though, from what I’ve heard about it from both Jay and my “sources”. ;D

It’s true, I’ve been cut pretty much completely out of it, but I’d been hoping like hell about that since before we even started because I’m shy about cameras, I much prefer the other side of the lens, outside of my webcam and even then I prefer stills because I’m less goofy looking/acting. So thank god for the cutting room! I do happen to know approximately what footage had been left in and where it’s going, but it’s still in post and I signed a contract and stuff, so I’ll just say it all sounds so very interesting. I love the camworld.

It occured to me the other day that when Jennifer Ringley was on Leno or Letterman or whatever the hell I posted, I bet half the audience didn’t even have the internet. Like half the people in the studio audience OR half the people in the viewing audience, I don’t know, but I bet there were a lot of people who really didn’t understand what she was doing and what it all meant. But everyone I know, at least from back then, did. And it’s stuff like that I’m trying to convey in the book, or at least I’d like to, but I have trouble when it comes how to present it. And in what order. And how long it should be. Plus the cam world keeps changing. The focus has been on YouTube for a while but there’s been a lot of undercurrents that the mainstream media, the “world at large” hasn’t caught onto because for a while there, it appeared as though video killed the camgirl. It didn’t, but that’s a whole other chapter.

Then there was also this pesky USC 2257 law (that was recently struck down), that I was trying to follow but personally, I find US politics really fucking boring. I find Canadian politics really fucking boring. (Unless either affects me, of course.) While I saw the effects of this law and saw how it was detrimental to both legitimate businesses (Camwhores for example) and our rights and freedoms should that kind of insanity spread north of the border, I paid attention, printed everything out and stuck it in my box of “book stuff”, which is slowly becoming two boxes, badly in need of proper sorting and filing. I’ll go through that crap later, I was too busy watching YouTube and trying to keep track of this iJustine thing. And the current state of the girls I’ve mostly been watching since I decided to write a book.

Anyway, I’m gonna shut up now. I just felt like addressing the world today, so hello! I hope you are having a good Thanksgiving to all my neighbours to the south and enjoy your festivities!

Jennifer Ringley on Letterman:

Who the hell is Jennifer Ringley?

So I pretty much spent the weekend completely obsessed with a woman named SuperLunary on YouTube. Why? Because she’s interesting, that’s all…well, and completely hot and funny too. I found her because a forum I go to was making fun of one of her videos where she filmed herself crying, which wasn’t one of my favourite videos of hers but you have to give the girl credit for being able to do it. Crying on cam is HARD. Not to be confused with acting in front of a camera, I mean crying, as yourself (as opposed to a character) with a camera in your face is hard, putting it out in a public forum is even harder. Trust me, I’ve tried, thinking “hey how come I never see people crying on the internet?” and well, that’s mostly why I think. It’s just hard.

And it’s funny how people react to crying in a public forum, they get mad. Girls on Camwhores have received thousands of minus votes just for such a crime. Weird, huh? People just don’t come to the internet wanting to be brought down, I guess. Mostly they come here to jerk off haha

Watching SuperLunary interact with other YouTubers reminded me of the portal 9 days and then it ocurred to me that SuperLunary probably doesn’t even know what portal 9 was or what Camwhores is and that sorta blows my mind because if it wasn’t for the almighty webcam, there probably wouldn’t even be a YouTube. I feel a little responsible for this, I was supposed to write the book about that. :| I’m still sorta working on it…sorta not. I don’t have a publisher anymore so it’s more like not, these days.

Anyway, that’s all for now, here’s my vlog #5:

[Video no longer available]

So yes, it’s true, I shaved my head. There are pictures over at my Live Journal and if you’re a Camwhores member, you can see the archived show of us doing the deed live on cam. I did video-tape the show with a second camera as well, but it’s going to take me a while to edit it into anything remotely worth watching, but it’ll be upon YouTube whenever I get around to it.

I got a tablet for my birthday from my in-laws (thank you!!!!), so for the past 24 hours I’ve done pretty much NOTHING except play with it. It’s gonna take a lot of practice, but so far I’m really liking it, it’s a damn nifty little device.

Also for my birthday, Blake got me a cell phone, which will be the first I’ve actually owned in about 5 years. Now I can join the rest of the world in the wonder that is text messaging! YAY! Wanna know my ringtone? When a call comes in, Celebrity Skin by Hole plays and when I get a text message it’s Hypnotize by the Notorious B.I.G. :D AND I even downloaded Hello Kitty wallpaper. Goddamn I love technology!

So that was my birthday, it kinda ruled. :)

Man, this WordPress thing sure does tend to attract a lot of spambots. Deleting spam from certain posts has almost been a full-time job lately. Any ideas on what I can do to make them stop?

My plan for this week is to fill out the pages under “The People in my World”. I realize I should be working on a layout but honestly, I can’t even think of one right now and I don’t really mind being generic for right now, so nyah.

I’ve spent most of today editing pictures and video of our big trip to Muskoka over the weekend. Once things are finished being written and uploaded, I’ll be making a big post with everything over at my Live Journal. That post won’t be dial up friendly, just a heads up.

Thursday, as I may have mentioned a time or two this month, is my birthday and as the days between now and then melt away, I’m becoming increasingly nervous about my show at Camwhores Thursday night. The show depends on certain people being here and helping me out and I’m afraid that something will come up at the last minute and make what I have planned impossible, or at least not as good as it could have been. This always happens, I get nervous like this before a show every single time I do one and it always ends up fine. This is the first time I’ve booked a solid hour of time, though, and I worry that it’ll be an hour of wasted bandwidth.

Whatever, it’ll be fine. It just will godammit!

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for right now, BYE!

So obviously, this is going to be the new site. I’ve had a lot of comments and e-mails of protest and confusion about the whole thing, so if there are any questions, ask ‘em here and I’ll do my best to keep everyone in the loop. (Honestly, a lot of times I forget that I’m not the only one looking at/reading this shit) Just do me a favour & mind the mess over the coming months, it’s probably gonna get a hell of a lot worse as I fuck things up completely trying to learn a whole new system I don’t even have the first clue about.

As an aside, there’s the Visual Quickstart Guide to Wordpress on my wishlist if anyone wants to help me out.

Someone asked me what’s going to happen to good ol’ LJ once this site is up & running the way I want it to be and I don’t really have an answer for that question yet. What I do know though, is that I feel gross mentioning movies or books or whatever in LJ and using my Amazon affiliates links to link to anything because it feels like I’m advertising to my friends and I think that’s wrong, so that was one reason to move away from LJ a bit. There’s also the drama involving cut tags and NSFW images, that really, I just don’t want to deal with anymore. Plus…some other stuff that’s a little more deep & neurotic that I might get into one day, but today’s just not that day. There are reasons, good reasons. :)

The “Sunnybananas” LJ will probably always exist, I mean I’ve got 5 years worth of my life archived there….I dunno. I just don’t know yet.

People have been asking me for like, a year now, what’s going to happen with Camwhores because it’s been pretty obvious that I’m not as into the site as I used to be - or at least, that’s the surface perception. The truth is that I got married, had another baby, bought our first house far far away from everything I’ve known my whole life and then…2006 was probably the worst year of my entire life. Our roof started caving in, I went crazy (like literally crazy, hospitalized, medicated & the whole works and I even did so in front of the whole fucking internet! I’m such a prostar.), I disowned damn near my entire family and then a few days before Xmas, I had to call the police on my mother which is this whole thing I promise I’ll get into publicly eventually, but not right now.

I just wanted to clear up that my activity over at Camwhores (or rather, lack thereof) has absolutely NOTHING to do with the site itself, the people who are there or any of that other crap. In fact, I’m a little bummed that I’ve been missing out on some of the changes over there and as I’ve been planning changes in my life and planning for the changes to come, Camwhores has played large in my mind. Truly, Kevin’s gonna have to drag me from that site kicking & screaming one day. This bitch ain’t goin’ nowhere. :D

Plus, some of the changes coming sound pretty goddamn interesting and I wanna be there for ‘em. :):):)

Some other questions I’ve received recently involve the cam book I’ve been “working on” for like…ever, called Digital Burlseque and the camgirls documentary myself and a bunch of other girls in the “scene” were filmed for.

So let’s start with the book…here’s what happened (well, the Reader’s Digest version, anyway):

Three or four years ago this guy named Brad King messages me on Yahoo (or MSN or AIM, I forget now) and basically I was all, “Cooooool, you’re a writer! With a real published book on Amazon & everything!” So we began talking and he tells me that I should write a book, I laugh and say “About what?” and he says “this webcam stuff”. Well, I didn’t take that seriously but then I got thinking and decided he might be right, so I started collecting and printing out articles on the subject and started throwing them in a box, knowing that eventually, this stuff wouldn’t even be on the internet anymore and if I was going to write a book on the subject, I should start squirreling away these things now.

About a year later, Brad tells me that he’s starting this small indie press that’s going to only cater to geek and internet culture, “it’s going to be to geeks what Sub-Pop was to grunge” were his exact words, and that Digital Burlesque would be the perfect book for such an endeavor, so get working on it! So I did. I conducted months and months of interviews both one on one and through forums, I wrote a proper outline as I was asked to do, I even got the first draft of the book about 3/4 finished, but then everything sort of went to shit.

First of all, I don’t know how to write a fucking book and writing books is hard, especially books that deal with dates and facts and doing things “first” and oh so many egos. I got absolutely zero support from Brad, my so-called editor and then I didn’t hear from him for months until he messages me to say that he’s taking a teaching position at some fancy schmancy new media & communications university. But of course, this means “big things” for Demon Press, right? He started telling me how this means that Demon Press could potentially become a univiersity press blah blah blah and this means good stuff blah blah. So great, I get excited again, resume working on the book and then I’m blown off for like, another year.

So while I waited for SOME KIND OF GODDAMN DIRECTION AND/OR COMMUNICATION or I dunno, HELP, I worked on another book, called Textibitionism, which I was going to just publish myself but I sent it to Brad and from what I understood of the conversation, he was going to publish it and I’d finish Digital Burlesque next.

The last message I got from Brad was 6 months ago saying that his students will be doing layout during second semester, which would be like…now. So I said, “great, lemme know if I need to do anything” and the response was “Write your damn book!” so I took it that he was talking about Digital Burlesque and not Textibitionism.

Well, sorry honey, but I can’t finish a book in 6 months and in the 4 years I’ve been “working on” it, Brad hasn’t even managed to edit what I’ve sent him, so well…fuck you! And hey, guess what? Newsflash, I’m not dropping everything because you’ve decided you’re gonna get your shit together. I mean, I’m sorry it just doesn’t work that way. I’ve been sitting here literally starving, often struggling, worrying, stressed out, going to the goddamn Food Bank on occassion to keep my kids fed and you’re gonna dick me around KNOWING ALL OF THIS? No, I’m sorry, the book, whenever finished (and it will be one day), is not yours anymore.

To add insult to injury, a couple of weeks ago I get a comment on my MySpace from Brad saying that as difficult as I am, happy new year anyway and that maybe “someday” I’ll communicate with him again. *eyerolls* Just…fuck off. I’m probably one of the easiest people on the whole goddamn internet to get ahold of and you wanna pin bad communication on me? Dude…

So that’s the saga of “the book”, more or less. I’m still working on it, in the sense that I live cam culture and speak with people within cam culture every single day, I print and collect everything I can and one day, the book will be done, but I don’t care if it’s finished one year from now or 30 and I don’t care how many books are published on the topic in the meantime. (Well, unless they’re inaccurate…. ;))

As for the documentary, honestly your guess is as good as mine at this point. Last I heard it was still in post-production and god only knows when it’s gonna be finished. Truthfully, I hope they cut me out of it completely (and they just might). I don’t regret doing it or anything like that, I just didn’t think this “my face on a big screen” thing all the way through when I agreed to do it…it’s just….creepy….

Anyway, screw all this “shop talk”, let’s get down to WoW. :D

This is Posey, she’s a lvl 60 bad-ass tree druid who’s really looking forward to Lifebloom because it sounds as bad-ass as I know she is. :D She hasn’t done MC, she hasn’t even seen Onyxia yet, she’s a long ways off from AQ20/40 and since 3 of the best people in her guild (who, unlike just about everyone else in the guild actually knew wtf they were doing) left today, she probably won’t be doing any of the above. Regardless, I’m gonna do my best to get her to 70 anyway because I really like being a tree.

Now, notice that I didn’t mention the server she’s on. There’s a reason for that. See, when I first started playing in June, I posted on LJ that I got an account and that I’d be playing on such & a such a server because some of my real life friends had made a guild there. Being a newb, I didn’t know this was a dumb thing, I was just writing about what’s going on in my life like I always do and it never ocurred to me that random people who read my crap on the internet every day would follow me to a WoW server, but some did and it’s caused some minor issues that I’d like to keep from blowing up into major ones in the future.

My guild leader last week made it clear that she doesn’t want “people in that industry” (meaning the internet porn industry because y’know, that’s all I do and you’re ALL nothing but a bunch of degenerate pedophile perverts who are ALL going to hell in a handbasket :D) in her guild, so fuck it, this week I think I’m gonna start a new one. On Tuesday when the expansion begins, Blake & I are going to choose a brand-spankin’ new server (as I’m sure Blizzard will be adding a few) to start the lvl 1 blood elf toon that’s been in my head since we found out that, indeed, BEs would be the new race. And we’re gonna play these toons, farm some gold - hopefully with some of you - and then when we’ve got enough people in our posse to sign a charter, this new guild will begin.

And yes, it has a name and yes, a tabard’s already been designed, but those are gonna be a surprise. :D The only rule (so far) though, is that all toons in this guild have to be blood elves, with two notable exceptions:

1. Druids, since they have to be tauren.
2. Transferred 60’s. (If anyone wants to go that route…)

Oh, and if you’re a ninja-looting douchebag, under 18 years of age or an egomaniac, don’t even bother.

Obviously I’ll post more details in regards to all of this next week, but if you’re a WoW player and aren’t sure yet what to do with all this new content, there’s an option. :)

I haven’t really thought about ranks, guild rules and what kind of guild this is going to end up being, but I figure that can be played by ear for the most part and a lot of that is dependent on the group we get anyway so we’ll worry about that later. All I know is that I’m pretty flexible & just wanna have FUN godammit!

Questions? Input? E-mail me (Sunny @ SunnyCrittenden.com) or leave a comment.

And with that, I gotta go work on some other stuff…

I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing, never have. I just have these ideas and I think they’re good, so I just…I dunno…do them.

This new site business is messing with my head. I don’t know where to begin executing the things that are in my head and part of me thinks that people should be seeing this site as it morphs into what it’ll eventually become. Screw the pressure of a giant “unveiling” by a specific deadline, especially since I’m not even totally sure what’s going to be on this site yet! I figured I’d just play it by ear and hope like hell it was done in time for my birthday because dammit, I want presents (you heard me) and I really want to do a birthday show at Camwhores this year because I STILL feel bad about not being able to do one last year. (I was on the rag, if you must know.)

So, like I said, I’m still figuring a lot of things out with this WordPress shit and I’m still trying to see if it’ll even do the things I want it to do (or if I can make it do them anyway). In the meantime, I feel like I’m almost reintroducing myself to the world because in recent months it seems as though a lot of new people have found my little bubble on the Internet and admitedly, that little bubble isn’t very streamlined at the moment. I’m workin’ on that. :)

Anyway, we’ll see what the year brings, but my goals are to become a little more accessible, share more things with the world, have more fun and to become better organized. This site is going to be a big part of that, or at least….I hope so.

Happy 2007! It’s gonna be a big one, I can feel it. :)